By James McAuley, Photo: PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), The New Yorker, September 18, 2022
When we begin “The U.S. and the Holocaust”—a six-and-a-half-hour, three-part documentary about America’s actions during one of history’s greatest atrocities, the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews—we find ourselves in 1933 Frankfurt, where a bourgeois German-Jewish family is going out for an afternoon promenade. This is the Frank family, whose youngest daughter, Anne, has yet to begin the diary, chronicling her days in hiding until her capture and eventual death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, that will one day make her a household name around the world. In 1933, all of that is still to come: the inhuman brutality of the Holocaust is still beyond the comprehension of well-to-do Jewish families like the Franks, and indeed of most everyone else. But now, after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, in January of that year, it is clear that something in the air has shifted. The Franks knew they had to leave the country in which at least some of their ancestors had lived since the sixteenth century. By early 1934, the whole family had settled in Amsterdam, with plans to move to America—“only to find,” in the words of the film’s script, “like countless others fleeing Nazism, that most Americans did not want to let them in.”
“The U.S. and the Holocaust,” directed by Ken Burns and his longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, is an examination of what Americans—politicians, journalists, and civilians—did and did not know about the Holocaust, and how they responded to it while it was happening and after it was over. Burns, now sixty-nine, is perhaps the most acclaimed American documentarian of his generation. He has used his work to investigate some of the most powerful symbols and totems of American life—in 1982, he won an Academy Award nomination, his first, for “Brooklyn Bridge;” in 1995, he won an Emmy for “Baseball.” Other topics since have included “The West” (1996), “Jazz” (2001), “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” (2009) and “Muhammad Ali” (2021), as well as several other series about America’s wars—the Civil War, the Second World War, and Vietnam.
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